


Wrong

by mliz18



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Cthulhu Mythos, Dark Lucifer, Eldritch, Horror, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian Monster(s), Other, what if Lucifer was an eldritch horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-02-11
Packaged: 2019-10-09 23:20:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17414471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mliz18/pseuds/mliz18
Summary: Lucifer as an eldritch monster, and sometimes Chloe thinks there's something fundamentally off about him.





	1. Chapter 1

There are moments when Chloe has to stop and allow herself to really, _truly_ think about Lucifer’s name. These moments are few and far between, and she dismisses them almost immediately, but it takes far longer to shake off the sense of dread that creeps under her skin and hammers against her ribcage.

Sometimes it’s when he’s angry; Lucifer will shout and Chloe could swear he’s roaring from a thousand gaping throats, hissing and snarling with primeval rage that scrapes over her skin like nails on a chalkboard. He’ll pace back and forth, throw whatever he can get his hands on, kick out at the walls, and sometimes she thinks she can see what looks like three great pairs of wings, claws dripping with slick blood, a writhing mass of tentacles, too many muscles straining and rolling under rough scales, _something_ , before it’s gone in an instant. He’ll stalk towards someone - a suspect, a criminal, someone who crosses a line - and suddenly he looks different, looks wrong. The shadows on his face deepen and his smile suddenly has too many teeth, and Chloe finds herself sick to her stomach watching him loom over his prey, towering what seems like hundreds of feet and stretching out to fill every inch of the room, until she blinks and eye and it’s just Lucifer. A trick of the light is what she tells herself.

Eyes can be fooled but human obstinance is no match for several thousand years of basic instinct. Her eyes will tell her nothing is wrong, but she can’t ignore the hairs on the back of her neck prickling as they all stand up, the muscles in her legs tensing to run, run as fast as she can, or the roar of the adrenaline in her veins screaming in the face of a predator. _Run! Get away! Danger!_ A trick of the light does not explain her body’s terror, the writhing mass with no fixed form, the wings becoming talons becoming tentacles, but Chloe cannot bring herself to believe anything else.

He was talking to her about his father once, quietly and with what seemed like the leaden weight of eons dragging down his voice. He looked up at her and she found herself being pulled, almost up and out of her seat, towards his eyes. Or rather, the spaces where his eyes should’ve been, but were instead just vast expanses of nothing, slices of deep space strung with dead planets and cold stars, the deep lonely _aching_ dark. And then he blinked, and the shrill call of his abyssal depths was gone. Sometimes, Chloe will think to herself that even his own eyes are wrong. She’ll look at his eyes, impossibly old eyes, sitting in his young face and something isn’t right. So she looks away, makes an excuse to slip out, pretends to take a phone call, anything to give her heart time to beat normally again.

 

Lucifer notices these moments and curses himself each time, because he likes to think he has complete control over his body. He chose it carefully after all, to hide the shining and twisting form that lies just beneath the surface. He can always feel it, waiting to burst shrieking and gleaming through his skin. His Devil face is only one of the faces his father gave him when he fell. He woke in Hell to find himself so hideous, so _wrong_ , that the demons submitted to him without hesitation as they quaked with utter horror, their new lord come in the shape of a writhing unholy tempest. He is magnificent. He is a terror.

But the moments when he’s too angry, too happy, or too preoccupied, he slips. He lets a wing or a claw or a few extra limbs flicker into view and watches Chloe’s face drain of color as she sees what humans aren’t meant to see. She’ll see a grinning mouth in the back of his head or thousands of eyes instead of his hands. He pulls himself back behind his skin, fixing it faster than her eye can see and cursing himself for being so careless, for letting himself slip beyond his carefully chosen body, the thin sheath of his disguise. Sometimes he doesn’t want to, desperate for her to truly _see_ him for once, but his true form would drive her to screaming insanity in the span of a heartbeat. Another gift from his father.

He was beautiful once, like all of his brothers and sisters, with gleaming wings and golden eyes and a voice that sounded like pealing bells. He shone with the warm, bright light of divinity and he glowed in the favor of his father, loved for his beauty. But then he fell and suddenly he spoke with too many mouths, moved with too many limbs. His name has always meant Lightbringer but now his light burns, and his demons had to bow or be burned by his fire, bow or feel their black eyes melt and drip down their faces.

He only longs for Hell in the moments when he remembers the time when he could be bigger than his skin. When he could stretch out his claws and teeth and wings and thousands of tongs with no pretense. His father made him a horror but his horror inspires awe. If God wants a villain in his story then here he is, a quivering and hissing horror that bends the laws of space and time.

But sometimes Chloe watches him with a soft look that he can’t quite place and, for just a moment, Lucifer feels every bit her beautiful, shining angel.


	2. author's note

Let me know if you guys would like to see something else in this little universe! I haven't written in so long this was a nice change of pace for me. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There is no place among the humans for a thing like him

He remembers what it was like to be an instrument of divinity. The Lightbringer, the Morningstar, gathering the light in his hands to string up the stars and planets and all their little moons. It was a joy, molding the universe around his lights. They were all his, all of the stars. But then he fell from the silver city down through the layers of the world and the body that once painted the cosmos with its galaxies withered into a husk, cracking open like a chrysalis to reveal the unholy terror of his father’s grotesque punishment.

He makes no apologies for his power, it is his birthright. But sometimes he feels an overwhelming shame, shame for the revulsion that crashes over Chloe’s face like a wave when he slips, shame for the terror he instills in his demons with nothing but his body. And then he feels nothing, because why should he feel shame for the shackles his father placed? Why should he mind the humans’ fear? They cannot fathom him, he who is the raw coursing energy of creation. But then he sees Chloe’s face and remembers that there is no place among the humans for a thing like him.

Lucifer loves the humans, really he does. Or at least he tries to. He admires their earnestness and their joy, their love, the exquisite vitality seeping from their every pore. He admires the humans but he doesn’t always understand them, and how could he? Small, devastatingly fragile mites buzzing around a Titan whose lives are a mere breath in the grand expanse of time. To cloister himself in one of their skins, to hold back the colossus of his true body as it shifts and morphs every millionth of a second, straining out against bone and muscle and sinew and veins, to pretend that he is as weak and breakable as they are, grates against every one of his basic instincts.

But he tries, lord does he try. He shrinks the enormity of his being into a fraction of himself, wraps his burning light in bones like toothpicks and covers his scales with skin so thin he has to fold his wings and talons and teeth in on themselves to keep them from bursting through. He can feel his body snarling underneath from thousands of throats, hissing through all his many teeth, the mouth sitting on the back of his skull grinning, his malformed hearts pulsing with nauseating energy as he denies his revolting self. He hobbles himself, reduces himself, desperate to slip amongst the humans and desperate to be seen as something other than a horror. They’ve called him many things over the millennia: Satan, the Devil, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles. He is tired of the fear in his name, the scorn, the judgment. It carries weight in the mouths of the humans around him, even as they deny his divine heritage. When Chloe calls out to him, he can hear in those three syllables all of her doubt and exasperation and fear as her lips close around his name. The affection and friendship are not enough to bely all that his name carries with it.

They were looking at the stars once, Chloe’s face turned skyward in exhaustion after a long night of work. Lucifer smiled to himself as she pointed out the constellations her father taught her - he didn’t create them with any sort of purpose, but he enjoyed how adept humans were at creating something out of meaningless configurations - but shy and surprised pleasure prickled up all of his many spines as she marveled at his stars.

When she asked if he has a favorite Lucifer looked to the empty space where he placed it, the first star he made, the star that his father snuffed out when he fell. In a hoarse voice barely more than a whisper he simply said _yes_. She turned sharply to look at him because she could hear the raw grief scraping up his throat over the star he’d been mourning for eons. She didn’t press, the loss was displayed intimately on his face, misery written with all his features.

He couldn’t see his stars from Hell but his father gave him the far-flung voids of deep space for eyes, a final wrench of the knife. When they peek out through his false face he can hear the shrill call of their darkness, mocking him with the dead bits of the universe he had created and loved. Dead stars he had molded with his hands that had gone cold in his absence and barren planets that he had created to be lush and full of life. _Look at what you’ve done_ , his eyes whisper, _you fell and your stars fell with you_ . _Shame, shame my son._

Shame is not a feeling that sits comfortably in a heart, it bites and twists and whispers horrid things. So Lucifer tries. He speaks out of only one mouth and pulls the gaping chasms of his eyes back behind his face, and sometimes it’s almost enough. He can almost block out the thrum of his body and the self-loathing that slithers up his spines, but he inevitably makes another mistake. He gets too angry or too distracted, forgets for just a fraction of a second that he has to hold himself back behind his skin. All it takes is the shudder of horror that passes over Chloe’s face for him to remember. There is no place among the humans for a thing like him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thinking of doing some sort of reveal where Chloe sees Lucifer for what he really is, let me know what you guys think of that idea!


	4. Chapter 4

It starts with a whisper hissed through clenched teeth. _There’s something wrong with Lucifer._

Chloe wants to dismiss him, because there’s always something wrong with Lucifer, but the undercurrent of strangled panic in Dan’s voice stops her. She just mumbles an excuse about a meeting and steps aside, making it a point not to look back so that Dan doesn’t see the way she’s trembling.

The idea takes root, because Dan is right. There has always been something wrong with Lucifer, and it’s not his lack of personal history or inappropriately timed sexual innuendos. It’s something very, very _wrong_ and in the deepest corners of her mind Chloe has always known. Normal people don’t flicker in and out of view like Lucifer does. They don’t speak with ten voices or suddenly have too many shadows. They don’t suck the air from the room when they’re angry. The small voice in the back of her mind, a vestige of ancient humanity, calls her body to response: _A predator is near. Death is near. Run, child, run_. But Chloe swallows her doubt and refuses to let it see the light. Lucifer is Lucifer, and his oddness is her oddness. That’s what she tells herself every time her eyes catch what she desperately hopes to be a trick of the light, and that’s what she repeats over and over in her mind as she gets herself as far away from Dan and his fear as she can.

 

Lucifer forgets that Chloe is in the building. He forgets that she can’t know what he is. He forgets that one glimpse of him could burn out her eyes. His mind has been reduced down to one simple, singular, delicious thought: _kill Pierce_.

Most humans would crumble at the sight of his immortal form, the hideous truth of fallen divinity, but Pierce is thousands of years old and cursed to be made of sterner stuff. He doesn’t faint but he does drop to his hands and knees, gaping and dazed but still aware enough to know what’s coming for him. To know _who_ is coming for him. Lucifer chuckles at the prostration, the unwilling worship before a blasphemous being, and the laughs are coughed out of more than one mouth and reverberate through the room like a drum beat. He’s still stretching, pulling himself through the thin layers of the world to set all his feet firmly in this one. The parts of him that don’t look human are wrapping slowly around the room, bending the light and sound and oxygen around him. It’s been so long since he’s used even a fraction of his full strength and he can feel his muscles rippling in anticipation, his tails flicking, his talons twitching. He smiles beatifically down at Pierce and watches the shudder run through him at all the shimmering lips curling back at once. Lucifer barely has to move, and Pierce is dead.

 

Chloe runs into the room to help but all there is is light. White-hot, blinding light and something pulling her towards the center of the room, the crushing gravity of a thousand suns dragging her forward and rendering the bones in her legs useless. She squints into it with her hands raised in front of her face, because the room isn’t supposed to bend that way and no light should be that bright, and for a fraction of a second she can make out its source. The shapeless, writhing, _burning_ source. _Lucifer_ is the only thought that runs through her head before the world goes dark. When Chloe wakes she’s in her own bed, and Lucifer is nowhere to be found.

 

No one else notices that Lucifer is missing from work. They’re too preoccupied tracking down a missing Pierce to realize that he hadn’t even called out. Endless calls to his penthouse, to the club, to his cellphone all go unanswered. Chloe lasts four whole days, twitching nervously and eyeing the front doors, before she snaps.

 

When the elevator doors open she spots Lucifer on the balcony, looking out over the skyline with his back to her. The moment she opens her mouth to announce herself, call out to him, _something_ , he heaves a great sigh that’s somehow worse than the rage she was expecting. She snaps her mouth shut and doesn’t say anything as she approaches him gingerly. It’s Lucifer, and even knowing what she does Chloe doesn’t _truly_ think he’ll harm her. Probably.

The silence stretches between them and even though he’s standing right in front of her Chloe has never felt so far from him. There are canyons, continents, oceans distancing them from each other. Acquaintances to partners to confidantes to strangers. After a small eternity he turns, and uncertainty is written plainly across his unshaven face. The Devil looks scared. Chloe’s vision blurs around the edges and for a moment it looks like Lucifer is stretching beyond himself, skin unfurling up and out to into sky above them. For just that moment the weight of his presence crashes down on her like a tidal wave and she can’t move an inch. Pressure crushes her ribcage like a vice grip and her feet are sinking deep into the concrete of the balcony, and all she can see are gaping chasms where his eyes should be, spangled with stars and sucking the oxygen up out of her lungs . She blinks, and there’s just Lucifer. Lucifer and all of his fear and resignation and misery.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” She asks, but even as the words leave her mouth she bites her tongue, because he did. Every day. About himself, his father, his family. And she ignored him. She spurned his earnestness and trust and desperate yearning for true connection. Lucifer blows an exasperated breath out through his clenched teeth.

“I was always honest with you about who I am.”

“You could’ve _showed_ me. Why didn’t you?”

He won’t look at her, and when he speaks his words are barely more than a whisper. Shame colors his voice.

“I could’ve hurt you.”

“But you didn’t” she pleads.

He won’t look her in the eye and Chloe demands to know why. It takes him a few moments to struggle through what he wants to say, mouth opening and closing silently as the words catch at the back of his throat.

“ _You are most precious to me._ ” Chloe blinks at him while he talks, not understanding the language or the raw emotion coating every syllable. His eyes are pleading with her for something she doesn’t understand and a watery smile is stretched across his face like broken glass but Chloe doesn’t have a single thing to say to reassure. He turns back to the skyline.

 

Lucifer closes his eyes. It’s been millennia since he’s spoken Enochian. The graceful roll of the words over his tongue are a small slice of the home he will never see again. It’s easier in Enochian to untangle his feelings, to hide behind the formality of angelic prose, each noun and verb steeped in implication and intent.

“Please, Chloe, just go.” His words are gentle but even not facing her he can see the distraught look on her face. He cuts her off before she can speak.

“Please.”

“Only if you promise to come back to work.”

Lucifer groans to himself. He almost reduces her to an incoherent pile of babbling drool and she’s demanding to see him _more_. Humans.

“Must I?

“Yes, or I’m not leaving.”

 _No!_ His mind screams.

“Fine.” His mouth says. _Damn it_.

 

He is skittish around her, skittish and scared. Chloe doesn’t like the way he makes sure to stay a few feet away or how he refuses to look her in the eye. He speaks quietly and chooses his words carefully, gentle in the way that only powerful men can be. She can’t stand the shame that stoops his shoulders and lowers his voice, or the way he acts like he doesn’t deserve the forgiveness and acceptance and kindness she is trying to offer him.

 

She snaps at him on his fourth day back, saying that she won’t crumble into dust if he doesn’t immediately flinch away from every small touch. Guilt wells up in her throat but she can’t stand the way he’s looking at her, so sadly as if no matter what she thinks he knows she’s wrong. Dread knots her stomach because it occurs to her that maybe he does know better, this eternal being who has known the world since its birth.

Lucifer doesn’t answer when she asks why he seems sad. There’s nothing he can tell her, because he _is_ sad. For _her_. Sad that she doesn’t understand and sad that she thinks she can redeem him. It will only end in heartbreak.

 

Chloe’s family was never overly religious. A few Sunday services here and there and grace being murmured quickly on Thanksgiving. She doesn’t really know the story of the Devil beyond cartoon horns and fiery pits full of the damned. So Chloe does what she’s good at, she investigates.

She does not like what she finds. A son cast down, exiled, painted in slander and steeped in thousands of years of guttural fear. The rejection Lucifer wears like a tailored suit, beauty turned to abomination and adoration curdled to hate. A father’s monumental failure to fulfill the most fundamental and integral requirement of a parent: unconditional love.

 

“You’re going to show me.”

“I’m really not.”

“Yes, you are. All of you.”

“Chloe it could drive you to the brink of insanity. You would be a shell, I would _burn_ your essence from your body.”

“I saw it before and I’m _fine_.”

“You collapsed. I would hardly call that fine.”

“Well the insanity hasn’t quite set in yet, so I’d say the odds are in our favor.”

Lucifer growls as he paces back and forth.

“ _Why_ do you need to see it?”

“How could I let you bear this alone?”

He blinks. And stares. And eventually gives a little nod.

 

Chloe steels herself as he rolls his shoulders and cracks his neck. He smiles at her but it’s thin and doesn’t reach his eyes. And then he shows her.

Lucifer tells her afterward, when she rises up through the murky depths of her consciousness to find herself carefully tucked under a blanket on his sofa, that she lasted an impressive six seconds before collapsing. She doesn’t remember it, all his changing forms have already faded from her mind, but when she blinks there are flashes of teeth as long as her arm. Of muscles straining out against stretches of scarred black skin. Thousands of eyes staring at her and blinking one by one until -

“Chloe” Lucifer prods her nervously with one finger, scared to touch her.

“I’m okay, I’m good, I’m fine” she pants. She looks up at him and for a few seconds she can see a flurry of emotions sweep over Lucifer’s face: fear, hope, misery, longing, resignation. She smiles.

“Hello.”

 

“Do all angels look like you?”

His lips curl at her question.

“No.”

 

“Do you really have horns and hooves?”

“I’ve told you. _Sometimes_ yes, _sometimes_ no.”

“That’s a terrible answer.”

 

“Are you sure you’re feeling alright?”

“For the love of G- sorry - yes I’m fine.”

“No dizziness? No pain? No feeling of your soul leaving your body?”

“No, but if you ask me one more time it’ll be three for three.”

 

Lucifer watches the elevator doors close behind Chloe after hours of sprawling explanations and shy steps around each other, basking in this new intimacy of shared vulnerabilities. He feels different, freer, after millennia of being looked at with horror. Millenia without love, millennia without a kind touch. The heft of the years is slipping off of his shoulders and relinquishing its hold on his bones. He is Atlas slipping out from under the weight of the world, a burden now made easier with a second set of hands. Camaraderie belying loneliness, relief replacing the ache. It isn’t like family, not quite, but it’s warm and safe and accepting and for now that is enough. The question he asks himself now, is does he deserve it?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I tried to write a more dramatic reveal with a fuller description of what his form looks like, but trying to pin it down as one specific image made it less scary and I knew that no matter how i did it people wouldn't be satisfied. Shoutout to the person who suggested the ten-headed dragon, that made it to the fourth draft and I wish I could've made the idea work. Let me know what you think :)  
> p.s. I'm terrible at dialogue so there isn't much.  
> P.P.S I tried to keep the POV switches from being too confusing, I just had so much I wanted to fit in.


End file.
